Commentary

Mobile Marketing Freeze Tag

One of the great parts of being a parent is that your children reacquaint you with the games of your youth. Recently, this happened to me at our block party when my kids joined an
impromptu game of Freeze Tag on a neighbor’s lawn. You remember Freeze Tag, right? Avoid the touch of the kid who’s “It” or find yourself frozen in place until another
competitor taps you back to life. Yes, the punishment in this game is that you’re immobilized while everyone around you runs around, free as the breeze.

As I watched my
kids’ game unfold, I was struck by how we unwittingly play Freeze Tag today as adults. On any given day, over half of the mobile subscribers in the United States run around with smartphones in
hand. Empowered by these devices, they do anything and everything they can with them until BAM!—they’re frozen by the tap of an unresponsive network, a glitchy app or a website that
isn’t optimized for mobile. Such “frozen moments” are a source of tremendous frustration for many mobile users, but perhaps not more so than the mobile traveler.

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According to a new report from eMarketer, the big three online booking
sites—Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity—are seeing anywhere from 50%-70% of their same-day hotel bookings made via mobile channels. Moreover, 30% of all online travel researchers are now
conducting their research on a smartphone. Immobilize these consumers, and they will undoubtedly take their business to the next website or app that doesn’t freeze them up.

So
how can you avoid freezing out mobile consumers? Here are a few tips:

1. Mobilize Web Before Apps

Mobile website or mobile
app? It seems to be the marketing question of our day, but, all things being equal, I fall squarely on the side of building and optimizing your mobile website before dabbling in app development.
Anyone with a smartphone can immediately connect with your mobile website through their browser. An app, however, requires consumers to find, download, and open your app to engage with it. Why force
so many steps on the consumer when a simple URL will do?

2. Avoid Flash

According to Nielsen, the Apple iOS is used by 32% of smartphone owners in the U.S. It is widely known that Apple iOS does not support Flash elements of any
kind, so if your mobile website still uses Flash, it is not mobile. Fix this immediately.

3. Test All Links on Mobile Devices

Here’s a pet peeve of mine that continues to happen time and time again. I receive an email from a travel-related company. I open the email on my smartphone. I click on a link in the
email which opens my mobile browser. The site detects that I’m a mobile visitor and, instead of taking me to my desired destination, opens up the mobile website home page. I’m then trapped
on the mobile site with no way to reach the link that was promoted in the email. Arrrrrgh!!!!

According to
ReturnPath, year-over-year email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4% and are on pace to surpass both desktop and website email views. You must, therefore, test that your links work in the mobile
environment. If you have a mobile website, this means that each and every link in your email—including the unsubscribe link—must resolve to the specific destination page and not the mobile
home page. Fail to do this and you’re alienating the entire mobile email audience you’ve worked so diligently to build.

4. Make Sure
Apps Offer More Than the Mobile Website

While I’m a mobile website first guy, I definitely see the value of mobile apps in travel marketing—but only when they
offer information, resources, tools or an experience that is superior to what the website can offer. The last thing you want to do is launch a subpar app with glitches that tanks in the app store
reviews. Good candidates for value-added apps are loyalty programs, booking apps, travel guides, games, and unique resources—just make sure your budget also includes money to promote the app to
build an audience. With over 650,000 apps in the Apple App Store alone, the days of “build it and they will come” are long gone.

5. Continue to Offer SMS
Alerts

While the majority of mobile subscribers in the U.S. now have smartphones, we must not forget our “dumbphone” (i.e., feature phone) brethren. Both
audiences continue to be very receptive to receiving SMS alerts from travel companies—especially when they add value to the travel experience. Also consider SMS for short-term communications
around your guests’ stay. SMS programs sometimes works best with consumers when it has a stated beginning and end.

6. Improve Wi-Fi
Connectivity

This should go without saying, but the bandwidth needs of mobile consumers are only going to go up in coming years. If you’re a travel brand with
physical spaces, wi-fi improvement should be a permanent line item on your budget in coming years. The deciding factor is no longer whether you offer wi-fi, it’s how fast and reliable the
connection is that you provide.

Since we’re still in the early days of the great mobile migration, it’s inevitable that we will unwittingly “freeze” mobile
consumers on occasion. The question is whether your brand will not only work to fix issues as they arise but also anticipate mobile consumer needs in ways that create competitive advantage.
That’s called freezing out the competition. And that’s a very profitable game.

Freeze tag: When a person is so attached to keeping their head down that they are frozen in that position and don't bother to make plans in advance from where they don't have to be frozen or miss things when they get to wherever (exception: air problems). They unfreeze when the slam into something/someone.